{"id":350105,"date":"2010-02-22T11:10:09","date_gmt":"2010-02-22T16:10:09","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.36347"},"modified":"2010-02-22T11:22:06","modified_gmt":"2010-02-22T16:22:06","slug":"finally-obamacare-arrives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/350105","title":{"rendered":"Finally, ObamaCare Arrives"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a year, critics of the Democratic health care plans have been applying the label “ObamaCare” to whatever the current draft was. That was inaccurate — because, as Democrats were eager to say, it was never quite clear to them what President Obama actually wanted out of a health care bill.  Today, the questions end. The President has unveiled his own comprehensive health care bill<\/a>. It borrows heavily from the Senate’s bill, adds some White House ideas, throws in some Republican-sponsored amendments, and pronounces itself ready for inspection.
The topline highlights:<\/p>\n

— Proposes to cover 31 million Americans
\n who
\ndon’t have health insurance;<\/p>\n

— Creates a new federal facility to
\n help
\nstates crack down on insurance industry abuses and unfair rate
\nincreases;<\/p>\n

— Includes significantly ramped up efforts to crack
\ndown on
\nwaste and fraud within the Medicare\/Medicaid systems — this is a nod
\nto Republicans (Peter Roskam and Mark Kirk are behind proposals to do
\njust this);<\/p>\n

— Adds a Medicare tax of 2.9% on unearned income —
\nhitting the wealthy; it immediately closes the Medicare Part D doughnut hole gap —
\nsomething seniors should notice before the November 2010 elections if
\nthis gets through Congress;<\/p>\n

— Increases tax credits to families
\nto
\nhelp them buy insurance; it spends $11 billion on community health care
\ncenters;<\/p>\n

— Endorses but adds consumer protections to the Senate’s
\nproposal to grandfather in insurance plans that people want to keep; it
\nadopts the Senate proposal to require that Americans who don’t buy
\ninsurance pay a flat fee — but lowers the fee;<\/p>\n

— Provides $40
\nbillion to small businesses to help them defray the costs of providing
\nhealth benefits if taxpayers pay for the coverage; the president delays
\nby five years the Senate’s excise tax on so-called Cadillac insurance
\nplans;<\/p>\n

— Increases fees for brand name (as opposed to generic)
\ndrugs,
\ndepriving the pharmaceutical industry of an extra source of profits;<\/p>\n

—
\n Eliminates the Nebraska exemption for Medicare payments and adopts a
\nuniversal, phased-in approach to help states pay for the increased
\ncosts of expanding the Medicare program. 100% of the increased costs
\nwould be paid for three years; the bill turns the fee on medical
\nequipment providers in the Senate bill into an excise tax and delays
\nits implementation; it also delays by three years the tax on insurance
\ncompanies;  <\/p>\n

— Finally, the bill gives the executive branch $1
\nbillion to
\nhelp efficiently implement the plan.<\/p>\n

The political highlights:
\nthere’s plenty in this bill for Democrats to like. But there’s no public
\n option. It’ll be easier to get unions on board because the excise tax
\nwill be delayed and watered down a bit; the bill delays implementation
\nof several provisions, which will annoy Democrats; it spends quite a bit
\n of time focusing on trying to rid Medicare of waste, fraud and abuse.
\nThere’s no nod to tort reform, so far as I can see. <\/p>\n

So — this
\nis just a bill. How does it become a reality?  It relies on the idea
\nthat Democrats now really want to get something done. There is no public
\n option or a national exchange; the bill is still expensive and fairly
\ncomplicated; there are some carrots for those concerned about the
\nexpensive of the House bill. It’s hard to see how any Republicans will
\nsupport the bill, although the White House is framing it in a way so as
\nto force Republicans to defend their opposition to it during Thursday’s
\nBlair House health care summit.  Since the first House vote, Democrats
\nare down at least three votes. <\/p>\n

The way forward: either
\nrank-and-file Democrats accept this bill — Obama’s bill — or they
\ndon’t.  Republicans could suddenly discover an upside in supporting it,
\nwhich is doubtful, but if they could also reduce the number of
\nprocedural delays to help the Democrats speed its passage. If not, we
\nmight be faced with the spectacle of Republicans trying to drag the
\nvotes out through the midterms. This could benefit either party; it
\ndepends on whether Americans view this bill, which is basically a
\nproduct of the bills they don’t like, as something new. The reason why
\nthey might do this is because they never really opposed the provisions
\nin the bills or the goals of the bills; it was the process that
\nalienated them so profoundly, making health care in 2009 unlovable.  <\/p>\n

Another
\n arrow in the White House quiver is the decision by insurers — Anthem
\nin California being the best example — that decided to raise rates
\nprecisely at this moment, allowing the White House to trump them with
\nits new insurance rate increase mitigation authority, a populist
\nproposal that
\n may — or may not work<\/a>, but which would be hard to oppose
\npolitically, particularly if it’s seen as the centerpiece of the plan.
\nThat’s why the White House, which governs through the New York Times,
\nprovided the Times with that aspect of the plan.

\n

\n Email this Article<\/a>
\n Add to digg<\/a>
\n Add to Reddit<\/a>
\n Add to Twitter<\/a>
\n Add to del.icio.us<\/a>
\n Add to StumbleUpon<\/a>
\n Add to Facebook<\/a>
\n

\n\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a year, critics of the Democratic health care plans have been applying the label “ObamaCare” to whatever the current draft was. That was inaccurate — because, as Democrats were eager to say, it was never quite clear to them what President Obama actually wanted out of a health care bill.  Today, the questions end. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4750,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-350105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4750"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=350105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/350105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=350105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=350105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=350105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}